blog

Early October my daughter, Sage baby sat our two labradors while we celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary out of town. While out of town we received a text from Sage with a picture of the beautiful coffee table book we gave her last Christmas. The book has amazing pictures of the most beautiful insects you have ever seen. It was a very nice gift and Sage loved the book. Tobi, our 2 year old Labrador had chewed on it. The book was ruined. I decided to offered Sage my book ( I have the same coffee table book) in exchange for her chewed up book. I thought I might use some of the pictures for a image transfer on a drawing or something. When I saw the chewed up page edges in layers I thought they were beautiful. Below is the book.

Coffee table book with chewed up pages.

That morning I went into my studio (garage) to start a drawing. Laying on the floor was a monumental abstract drawing of a hat from last week. I had abandoned the drawing in frustration. The piece just did not work and had several large tears in the paper. Today the tears reminded me of the chewed up layers of the book.

Last weeks monumental drawing of abstract a hat "gust" with tears

I decided to see if I could work the book pages into the abstract drawing tears. As I tore off the crumpled pages they reminded me of leaves with beautiful insects on them. I decided to not glue them flat against the paper but to only attach them like fallen leaves with bugs/insects/beetles on them.

Adding layers of pages from the book into the tears of last weeks drawing disaster.

More more more

The pages/leaves stood out too much so I added color to blend them in or camouflage the insects.

Detail

I am not sure if this is a finished piece or if it still needs something. It is very sculpture ish and maybe I should build on that take it further or maybe not. I will live with it for awhile. Any thoughts?